“My vacation, my preference, my cure for all things Platonic has always been Thucydides.  Thucydides, and perhaps Machiavelli’s Principe, are most closely related to me in terms of their unconditional will not to be fooled and to see reason in reality, – not in ‘reason’, and even less in ‘morality’… You have to turn Thucydides over, line by line, and read his ulterior motives as clearly as his words: there are few thinkers with so many ulterior motives…  In the end, what divides natures like Thucydides from natures like Plato’s is the courage in the face of reality; Plato is a coward in the face of reality, – consequently, he escapes into the ideal; Thucydides has self-control, and consequently he has control over things as well…”

– Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “What I Owe the Ancients,” 2.

I. Thucydides’ History and Political Philosophy

Thucydides wrote one remarkable and unique work, known as The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, devoted to painstaking description of the cities engaged in the greatest and most terrible war known to him (I.I, I.23), meant to be ” a possession for all time” (I.22.4).

If we compare Thucydides’s History with the classics of political philosophy by Plato and Aristotle, we are struck by the gulf which seems to separate them.  The Republic and the Politics deal chiefly and primarily with the best political order, the best regime, with an arrangement which is possible, but not actual.  This orientation leads necessarily to the deprecation of actual political life, since this life, when seen in the light of the best regime cannot but appear deficient.  The whole sphere of political greatness fades into insignificance the moment the question of the best regime is raised. Perhaps only the greatness of the founder or legislator survives, albeit dimly.

Thucydides, on the other hand, takes political life seriously, on its own terms; he does not simply transcend it, rather he takes the actual city seriously.  Moreover, his theme is only the actual city.  Consequently his cities are not so harmonious as those we find in the moving descriptions of the best regimes in the Republic, the Laws and the Politics.  These cities are without discordance, unlike the accounts of Thucydides.  So far from any “ideology” or “utopia” what we are presented with in the pages of Thucydides is actual cities engaged in “real” “power” politics.

Now one might argue, and many have, that this is due to the fact that Thucydides is not a philosopher, but rather an historian.  But what is an historian?  According to Aristotle, in his Poetics, the historian is distinguished form the poet as follows: the historian says what has happened; the poet tells us what kind of thing might happen; therefore poetry is more philosophic and more serious than history, for poetry deals more with the universals, and history simply states the particulars.  So when Thucydides speaks about Pericles, he means the individual Pericles, whereas when Sophocles speaks about Antigone, any accidental features are irrelevant.  For Aristotle implies that poetry is between philosophy and history.  Philosophy and history are at opposite poles.  History is simply non-philosophic; it deals with individuals, human beings, or collections of human beings, whereas philosophy deals with the species as species.  Poetry is somehow in the middle: poetry deals with the species in the individual.  Philosophy deals with war as such; Thucydides deals with the Peloponnesian War from 431-404 BCE.

Thucydides sometimes seems to suggest that he is an historian in this sense, as Aristotle defines it, what is called a “chronicler.”  Thucydides speaks of such a chronicler, Hellanicus (I.97), who is not exactly detailed enough, and Thucydides says that what he has neglected, he will cover sufficiently; in this respect, Thucydides seems to be a new kind of chronicler.  But even in this context he makes clear that he has a different intention, a much broader and more comprehensive intention.  And above all, Thucydides has declared his intentions most clearly in the opening of the first book.  And what he says there excludes altogether the view that Thucydides was an historian in Aristotle’s sense.  However this may be, if Thucydides is an historian, he is an unusual, perhaps unique historian.   

Still others argue that Thucydides was both an historian and a poet, or artist, or tragedian, etc.  In this way, one tries to account for the unusual elements in Thucydides as an historian.  Still others countered this possibility with the suggestion that Thucydides’ art is simply his excellence as an historian.  An ordinary historian might select only the events, which were important for the course of the war, i.e. the decisive battles, treaties, negotiations, things important for the course of the war and its outcome, but Thucydides, being an unusual historian, an excellent historian, has also selected events which did not effect the course of the war at all, but incidents which throw light on the war as a whole.  In other words, Thucydides selects events, which might be unimportant for the course of the war, but important for the understanding of this or any other war.

Thucydides is intelligent enough to see the drama in the events and has the power to present that drama in the most effective manner. Like a tragic poet, Thucydides sees and presents the universal in the singular and only in the singular.  His unrivalled quality is an historian is that like the perfect tragedian he lets the drama tell its own tale.   But unlike tragedy proper, the Thucydidean drama is nothing but the events themselves, intelligently perceived and forcefully presented.

It was not of poetry that Thucydides reminded the great English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes.  Thucydides surely did not intend to be a poet; he made it very clear that poets are men who magnify and adorn, who makes things bigger and grander than they really are, in short, exaggerators. Or, at least the Greek poets were such, and Thucydides was to show things exactly as they were.  Hobbes is reminded by Thucydides not so much of poetry as of philosophy, more specifically of moral or political philosophy.  The scope of history, according to Hobbes, distinguished from songs is “profit by writing truth.”  Hobbes elaborates:

“Digressions for instructions’ cause, and other such open conveyances of precepts which is the philosopher’s part, he never useth; as having so clearly set before men’s eyes the ways and events of good and evil counsels, that the narration itself doth secretly instruct the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept.”

Thucydides’ History, by contrast, teaches completely by narrative, and there is no exalted speech on man and politics.  Rather the narrative tell us more than the story of the Peloponnesian War, it tells us about man and politics in general, but only through narrative.  Hobbes said that Thucydides was the most politic historiographer that ever writ.  Moreover, Thucydides’ way of teaching by narrative as distinguished from precept is more politics, more politically effective, than the way of the philosopher.  Yet in spite of the great distance between the old Hobbesian historiography and the views of our age, both agree on one point: that Thucydides’ narrative itself secretly instructs the reader, the narrative and not Thucydides.

In sum, one must go back behind the traditional distinction between history and philosophy to grasp Thucydides’ History.  The distinction as it has come down to us, we know from Aristotle.  Whether it even existed in Thucydides’ mind is unknowable.  Perhaps it is best simply to speak of Thucydides’ wisdom.

 

II.  The greatness of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides narrated the Peloponnesian War not merely because it was the opportunity to observe this particular war, because he happened to live at the time, but because the Peloponnesian war was the singularly memorable war.  Why?  It was, in the first place, the most memorable Greek war.  And Thucydides shows this in his introduction by comparing the Peloponnesian War to the two only other wars, which could be regarded as comparable in greatness to the misery of the Peloponnesian War, the Trojan War and the Persian War.  The Trojan War was inferior for the simple reason that it was magnified by Homer; and Thucydides narrated the most memorable Greek war which eventually to in all Greeks of the homeland or islands, and which even affected, so to speak, the largest part of mankind.  The Peloponnesian war was for him, so to speak, the first universal war, and not only the most memorable Greek war.

He proves this assertion in the long introduction, the “archeology.”  Thucydides there argues that the most famous Greek war, the Trojan war, is such only by the power of poetry.  Thucydides also thinks the same is true of the Persian war.  Both could not have been so great owing to “the weakness of the ancients.”  In the olden times, the ancients had no power, especially no naval power.  And then Thucydides describes the slow rise to strength thru the ages, a rise which created the power and the wealth of the Athenians at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, and the peak was reached in 431 BCE.  But the rise of the power and wealth from original weakness and poverty was also a rise form original, universal barbarism, to the clear distinction between barbarism and what we may call Greekness, or civilization.  Thucydides makes this point that at the time of the Peloponnesian War there were not yet Greeks.  The name Greek Hellenes was applied only to a very small part; and at one point he even says there were no Greeks.  The characteristics of the Greeks arose very slowly later.  Now the war, which affects the only two parts of the human race, Greeks and Barbarians, may be called “universal.”  The human race, that is the implication of the archeology, has two poles: barbarism and Greekness.  And in this sweeping way Thucydides implies it makes no difference the highest civilizations Persia and Egypt and the savages, which live in northern Greece were all barbarian in every sense.  Not that Thucydides did not know the difference, but he wants to convey a fundamental problem: the human race has two poles: Barbarians and Greekness; and Greekness in its turn has two poles: Sparta and Athens.

Sparta and Athens were the two poles of Greekness and were at their highest point when the war broke out.  For any people to be at their highest point in regard to war presupposes that they must have lived for a long time in peace, or unperturbed by big wars.  The highest point in regard to war presupposes the highest point in regard to peace.  If we assume then, that war and peace, barbarism and Greekness, Sparta and Athens, are the fundamental opposites, which is what Thucydides implies in his “archeology,” then the Peloponnesian War is the climactic war, which reveals these opposites at their highest point.  And therefore it reveals the full human truth.  All human possibilities are exhausted, that does not mean other things will not happen or come to be, there will come a decay, all kinds of changes which are unpredictable, and there will be something like Athens or Sparta again perhaps, but the fundamental possibilities are exhausted.  Now it is in this way, that the singular and universal are interwoven in Thucydides’ History.  He describes only this war between these cities, Sparta and Athens, 431-404 BCE, and in telling this narrative he told the whole story of the political life of humanity, which contains the private life within itself.  Thucydides wrote his History in such a way so as to disclose the whole life of man, its permanent possibilities and the human nature at its core.

 

III.  Athenian Imperialism and the problem of justice

Thucydides central theme is Athenian Imperialism: repeatedly in his pages we hear the spokesmen for imperial Athens defend their city’s imperial political project by denying that “right” or justice has any role in relations between cities.  According to these Athenian spokesmen, it has always been established for the weaker to be kept down by the stronger, that no one with a chance to acquire something by force has ever yet been dissuaded by the argument that it is unjust to do so, and that accordingly justice has no role unless between equals in power (I.76.2; 5.89).  In other words, the Athenian thesis amounts to denying that justice has any role in international relations between it has no support in the real world.

And yet Thucydides account does not simply bear out the truth of the Athenian claim.  For the Spartans and their allies claim to wage war against Athens in order to save Greece from the tyrannical ambitions of Athenian imperialism.  In other words, the Spartans claim to wage a just war, which is as such supported by the gods.  In fact, the majority of the Greeks sided with the Spartans at the beginning of the war under the impression that they were indeed fighting a war of liberation with promises of assistance from the god at Delphi.  The Spartans then make the case for the power of justice in the world, backed up by gods that reward the just and punish the unjust against the shameless frankness of the Athenian thesis; and in the end, the Spartans do win the war.

Thucydides’ pages then give voice to two opposing theses on the role of justice in human affairs.  According to the Athenians, justice has no place in the real world of power politics.  While according to the Spartans, justice does have real power in the world.  Thucydides narrative is primarily an investigation of these two theses on justice and the question they raise – what is the place of justice in human affairs? – and the ways of life, politics, piety and individuals they give rise to.

 

IV. The “Realistic” Thesis of the Athenians

On the eve of the outbreak of the war, the Athenian envoys at Sparta make the case that Athens cannot be blamed for having acquired their empire  since they were compelled to do so by “the greatest things”, “fear, honor and interest.”  And since they contend that fear, honor and interest are irresistible impulses felt by all political communities, they are like all others overcome by the desire for empire; but it has always been established that the weaker be kept down by the stronger, and no one with the opportunity to acquire something by force has yet been dissuaded by argument that it is unjust to do so (I.75-76.2).  According to the Athenians, interest compels and excuses no less than fear.  So self-interested behavior is above reproach; it follows that moral categories are simply not applicable to international affairs.  But if any self-interested action by a political community is compulsory, and hence cannot be condemned, what remains blameworthy?  It is not so much that the Athenian envoys argue that might makes right, so much as that right has simply no place in international relations.

The Athenians restate their thesis later in book V in one of the most famous passages of the book, not to say, political thought or literature altogether, in the so-called “Melian Dialogue.”  The Athenian ambassadors this time do not even deign to defend the justice of their empire or decision to attack Melos, since as they state, justice has no power in the world except between equal powers (5.89).  The implication is that there is no power in the world that will enforce justice beyond that of human beings.  But the Melians, refuse to abide by the Athenian understanding and instead advocate the Spartan position and belief in the power of justice in the world.  The Melians believe that the gods will come to their defense since they “are pious men who stand against men who are unjust” (5.104).

In this way the Melians challenge the Athenians on theoretical grounds.  For to the extent that the Athenians argue that justice has no role in international affairs, because justice has no power in the real world, they assume that the world is fundamentally indifferent to justice; hence that there are no divine powers that enforce justice in the world by rewarding the just and punishing the unjust.  Thucydides forces the reader to wonder how the Athenians or anyone else for that matter, can no that there is no moral order in the universe, and hence have confidence in their own thesis about justice in human affairs?

The Athenians respond to the Melians argument by denying the Melian assumption that there are just gods who reward and punish human beings depending on desert.  Moreover, the Athenians argue that precisely on the basis of the Melians own assumptions such gods do not exist.  Rather, all human beings are compelled by a necessity of their nature to want what is good for themselves, and pursue the power that is in their interest, without any regard to justice.  In other words, all human beings are compelled to care more about self-interest than justice, the Melians are not morally superior to the Athenians, they are simply prevented from acting as the Athenians do by their inherent weakness.  Likewise, if there are gods as the Melians claim, they too cannot favor one side over the other, since it is not between justice and injustice, but between two equally self-interested parties.

 

V. The “Moralistic” Thesis of the Spartans

Thucydides never addresses the Athenian argument at Melos in any straightforward way.  In order to ascertain Thucydides’ view of the Athenian thesis we must consider his presentation of its opposite: the Spartans.  Sparta, while a great power, is not an expansive imperialist polis.  Spartan spokesmen repeatedly make the case that the war against Athens is fought to liberate the Greek cities form Athenian tyranny.  And we can see that in the presentation of the Spartan general Brasidas, praised for both his virtue and intelligence (4.81.2-3), on an expedition to liberate the northern Greek subjects of Athens (4.78 ff.).  At first blush, Sparta seems to contradict the Athenian assertion that all cities are compelled by self-interest above all.  For Sparta seems to care about the freedom of her fellow Hellenes, that the victory over Athens is then the victory of justice over injustice; hence the Spartan victory is the vindication of the power of justice in the world.

But is the Spartan way so different from the Athenian?  Are they motivated more by justice than by fear and self-interest?  Thucydides says in his own name, the truest cause for the Spartans going to war was of fear of growing Athenian power.  They are not above violating sacred oaths in pursuit of their perceived self-interest.  And later in the war, when they agree to the Peace of Nicias, they not only abandon their just war against Athens, but abandon the very Greek cities that Brasidas had liberated in exchange for 300 hundred POW’s.  Indeed, the purpose of Brasidas’ foray was to trade the liberated cities for a peace settlement favorable to Spartan interests (4.81.2, 4.117).  Finally, the only reasons the Spartans refrained from an expansive imperial policy was due to the fact that they had a hidden slave-empire at home: Sparta had more slaves than any other city, the Helots, whom they conquered in the distant past, and from whom they lived in constant fear that they would rise up in rebellion, as they had in times past.  In other words, the Spartans dare not send so many troops abroad for fear of losing power at home.

In the end, Thucydides’ portrayal of Sparta seems only to reinforce the Athenian understanding of justice and self-interest.  The Spartans are merely hypocrites, who happen to hold whatever is in their own self-interest to be just and full of recriminations at those who stand in the way of those interests.  At least the Athenians are frank imperialists without any hypocritical pretense to moral superiority to their enemies.

 

V.  The Melian Dialogue and the Mytilenean Debate

What then to make of the portrait of the Melians?  They seem to reject the very grounds of the Athenian thesis that all human beings are compelled to pursue their own self-interest.  Since they present the spectacle of a people that would rather fight and die the unjust Athenians than live as slaves under their unjust imperial rule.  And yet even here, the Melians claim they are not choosing death, but rather pursuing their highest true interest.  They express the pious hope that the gods will come to their aid in their just fight against the Athenians and reward their justice.  The Melian’s hope expresses the belief that justice is good; good for human beings, and hence that it is in the interest of a human being to be just.  In this way, the Melians, by their own admission, are no less self-interested than the Athenians.  The Melians, then, do not contradict the Athenians’ contention that we human beings are compelled by our nature to wish for what is good for ourselves and to pursue that good as it appears to us.

The Melian Dialogue is followed by the slaughter and enslavement of the Melians, and Thucydides tempts us to think that the Athenian position on justice and self-interest leads to great inhumanity.  And yet, the Athenians action was not a necessary consequence of their argument.  In fact, throughout, the Athenians, while acting according to their amoral thesis, are more humane than the moralistic Spartans.  Could it be that the Athenian thesis, rightly understood, might issue in a greater allowance for gentleness?

The Spartans, convinced in the justice of their cause, the liberation of Greece, assume all who oppose them must be unjust.  Consequently, they do not hesitate, time and again, to condemn and execute those whom they conquer or take prisoner.  The Spartans simply assume that justice coincides with the interests of Sparta; therefore all human beings have an obligation to promote the interests of Sparta; so that anyone who opposes Sparta must be willfully unjust, hence deserving of punishment.

Whereas the Athenians believing all human beings compelled by natural necessity to pursue what they believe to be in their own interest, see all people as simply doing what they cannot help but do, when acting on self-interest, so they cannot be reasonably blamed or punished for seeking what they perceive as good for themselves.  So they cannot oppose, as the Spartans do, those who oppose their interests.  The Athenian understanding excuses those who would resist Athenian imperial tyranny as much as it excuses the very pursuit of that empire by Athens.

The Athenians evince great humanity and gentleness in their treatment of the Mytileneans, and Thucydides affords us a powerful glimpse of the difference of Athens from Sparta in their deliberations and deeds on that occasion.  While still suffering from a devastating plague, in the midst of war, the city of Mytilene has revolted against Athenian rule, attempting to defect to the Spartan side.  At first, the Athenians are enraged, since they have treated the Myteleneans mildly, and the timing is precarious.  So the Athenians put down the rebellion and resolve in an angry fit to put to death all her male citizens and enslave her women and children.    But a day later, the Athenians change their minds, feeling it savage to destroy the whole city if only the leaders are responsible for the rebellion (3.3.1, 3.36).  So they hold a second assembly to reconsider the question of the fate of the Myteleneans.

In this second Assembly Thucydides gives us “the most violent Athenian citizen”, Cleon, who argues that it is both in Athenian self-interest and just to demand the punishment of all Mytilene.  Meanwhile, a character named Diodotus, whose name means “gift of god”, and who is the only character unknown outside the pages of Thucydides, and appears only this one time, argues against Cleon’s anger and vengefulness, that the majority of the Mytileneans should be spared.  Diodotus argues according to the Athenian thesis, that since all human beings are compelled to pursue self-interest regardless of the demands of justice, the Mytileneans cannot be blamed for rebelling against Athenian rule.  So justice cannot demand the punishment of all the Mytileneans, since justice cannot demand that human beings be punished for doing what they cannot help doing.  In line with this, Diodotus argues that that the Athenians should not think about justice at all, but only consider whether it is in their interest to destroy Mytelene.  He goes on to convince the Athenians that it is not in their self-interest to kill all the Myteleneans.  In this way, precisely by arguing that justice has no place in international politics, Diodotus is able to get the Athenians to think about their self-interest, and not the perceived “injustice” they have suffered.  By appealing to their reason and encouraging the Athenians to calmly consider their self-interest, Diodotus frees them, on this occasion at least, from the spell of their moral indignation and its punitive passions which held that all Mytilene deserved punishment; he thus prevented the senseless slaughter of an entire city and even manages to save a large majority of them.

 

VI.  Thucydides’ view of Athenian Imperialism

How then to appraise Thucydides’ own view of the Athenian empire and the thesis that underlies it?   Just as Sparta had proven to be hypocritical and far from their own self-understanding, so too Thucydides’ portrayal of Athens suggests, as a kind of extreme or limit case, that no political community can successfully conduct its foreign policy on such a an outspoken amoral basis, and that some version of Spartan moralism, despite its hypocrisy, is a more sound basis for conducting foreign policy.  The Athenian thesis proves to be mistaken both on prudential as well as theoretical grounds.

According to the Athenian thesis, since all human beings are compelled by their nature to pursue their self-interest, without regard to the demands of justice, all nations simply pursue their self-interest and never transcend that concern.  Such an enlightened nation must be free of the passion to blame other nations for defying or attacking them, as well as free of all passions of righteous anger towards anyone.  Since it is absurd to blame others for pursuing precisely what you hold to be the naturally compulsive power of perceived self-interest, they couldn’t reasonably act otherwise.  Moreover, according to the thesis, no nation should ever blame itself for acting unjustly, ignobly or impiously in pursuit of what it takes to be in its self-interest.  But this means an enlightened nation must never regard itself as morally superior to any other; it is neither more just nor more noble than any other, and hence does not deserve any honors or benefits by virtue of noble or just superiority to self-interest.  There are no just, noble or holy nations; there are no just, noble or holy causes.  In short, such an enlightened nation must live without the comforting thought that they, or any other nation, has any special place in the scheme of things.  For how could a god or gods reasonably, or justly, reward or punish human beings for simply acting as they must, driven by the natural compulsion to pursue their putative self-interest.  Accordingly, one must give up the hope that god or the gods will reward one for one’s justice, or defend one against enemies, or ever ensure survival or success.  To live according to the Athenian thesis is to accept Pericles’ enlightened judgment that “all things by nature… decline.”  Even the enlightened nation will vanish from the earth without a trace.

Thucydides shows us why such a frankly amoral thesis as the Athenian can never truly become the basis of any political community.  For even such a shamelessly realistic people as the Athenians prove unable to live up to it.  In this way, the Athenians act as a limit and test case: even such realistic and successful imperialists as they fail to maintain their own thesis, and if not they, then who?  Thucydides presents myriad examples of the Athenians failing to treat conquered peoples according to their own self-interest; rather more often than not, they give in to righteous anger and the desire to slake their thirst for vengeance and seek retribution by slaughtering and enslaving those whom they perceive to have done them an injustice (i.e. the Scioneans, the Melians, etc.).  Thucydides documents an even deeper contradiction in the Athenian thesis.  For while they claim that all nations are compelled by their nature to pursue what they deem their self-interest, they also claim that they are morally superior to other nations, since they possess a noble superiority to mere considerations of interest, they think they deserve to successfully hold their empire and the glory it affords (1.76.3-1.77; 4.122.5-6, 5.32.1, 5.116.3-4).  Pericles goes so far to speak of the Athenians moral superiority both by virtue of their superior generosity to others without calculation of profit or loss, as well as by the sheer grandeur of their ambition: they seek an unlimited empire despite the great dangers and terrible misfortunes it risks.  The imperial ambition itself is a sign of their noble superiority to mere calculation of danger.  So while the Athenians may not claim to care more about justice than self-interest, they do claim to deserve imperial success and “eternal fame”.  They too then, like the Melians, implicitly believe in the power of justice in the world.  For to claim that they deserve the rewards of empire and glory is to believe and hope that they will get what they deserve.  Implicitly they believe that the world is so ordered that the noble transcendence of mere self-interest is a claim on the attention of those powers, god or gods, that they be justly rewarded.

The Athenians in the pages of Thucydides then are as hypocritical in a way as the Spartans with respect to their own self-understanding.  Since despite their constant derision of pious hopes in the name of amoral and impious realism, they cannot suppress such hopes within themselves (5.10, 5.111).  The Athenians own hope for divine assistance cannot be suppressed.  On more than one occasion they seek to purify the sacred island of Delos to win favor with the gods; in the end their desire to suppress pious hope leads to a religious explosion, so extreme and destructive that it will lead directly to disaster and defeat in the Sicilian expedition.

Thucydides shows us that even the extraordinarily realistic and “enlightened” Athenians cannot simply free themselves from what they must deem, according to their own thesis, unreasonable passions and illusions, namely, conscience, guilt, righteous indignation and the desire to punish, pious hopes and fears.  It seems as if the very moral and religious passions their thesis demand they quell in the name of the naturally compulsive power of rational self-interest, return with a vengeance and overwhelm them.  The very example of Athens herself is the greatest rebuke to the Athenian thesis.  Thucydides thus suggests no nation can accomplish such a frankly amoral and impious realism because it cannot satisfy the profound human longings divined in the desire to transcend mere self-interest in the name of nobility and justice.  Whereas the Spartan thesis is able to answer to those human longings.  The moralistic Spartans, convinced of the justice of their cause, who never try to conduct a frankly self-interested amoral foreign policy never suffer the self-destructive explosion of religious hopes and moralistic backlash of the Athenians.  The Spartan way seems ultimately more sensible and hence realistic than that of the “realistic” Athenians.  Justice is a concern no state can escape (7.18).

 

VII.  Thucydidean Wisdom

Contrary to the assertions of the Athenians, the desire to transcend one’s self-interest in the name of justice is in a deeper sense, reasonable.  For the Athenians maintain not only that all human beings are compelled by nature to pursue what they deem good for themselves, regardless of the claims of justice, they also contend that political rule, power over other human beings, is the most compelling human good.  As a result, the Athenians claim that all human beings are compelled to pursue what the Athenians themselves pursue, namely freedom from foreign domination and empire.  This is the ultimate ground of their rejection of justice and the various attempts to transcend self-interest.  Thucydides, however, rejects the claim that these are the greatest goods for human beings.  He points rather to the ways that the Athenians, no less than the Spartans, attempt on various occasions to transcend their desire for political power so conceived in the name of nobility or justice.  In this way he indicates that they themselves cannot wholeheartedly believe that political power is the most fundamental goal of human life.  The speeches and deeds of the Peloponnesian War reveal that human beings – Athenians and Spartans, Hellenes and Barbarians – all long for a higher or greater good.  The very uneasiness of the Athenians with their empire is a divination that there is a human good greater than empire and its glory.  Thucydides himself, and the progress in understanding he gains from “the violent teacher war” and indirectly shares with us in his pages, is testimony to the superiority of the good of understanding or wisdom to that of empire and glory.  Thucydides reveals himself as one devoted solely to the truth (1.20.3), and whose work will benefit its readers, not by teaching them how to gain power or empire or glory, but by teaching them to understand for themselves the permanent and comprehensive truth about human nature, that as long as there are human beings, human nature will, when given a chance, break all the most sacred restraint of law and justice.  Thucydides’ work, meant to be a possession for all times, suggests that long after Athens and Sparta have vanished, the truth about human and political life, will still be useful, and in this way, the wisdom it discloses is, contra Pericles, grander and more enduring than any glories of Athens and her empire.  In this way, it is reasonable for human beings to attempt to transcend the self-interested pursuit of power, empire and glory; counter the Athenian thesis, the very aspiration to justice is a divination of the existence of a good which surpasses the grandeur of power and empire and can spur human beings on in the rational pursuit of that truly fundamental good.  Thucydides by means of the subtle unobtrusive presentation of his own progress in wisdom and understanding, lets us see a way of life, the trans-political life of thought pursued for its own sake, such that he vindicates the longing for a way of life that transcends the narrow pursuit of power, empire and glory.